Thursday, April 10, 2014

Women almost left out 50 years ago -- April 10, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Six. One. Not at all.

That’s how many times President Lyndon B. Johnson uttered
the words “men,” “housewife” and “women,” respectively, in his nationally
televised speech when he signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The tally is significant because it shows how little
emphasis even LBJ put on the law’s potential effects on women’s lives. Coverage
of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act again has focused on
the struggles of African Americans and other people of color, but we should
remember that the law transformed all of society. The law prohibited employment
discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race.

Today’s media savvy White House leaves little to chance, making
sure photos of the president look like a soft drink commercial. For example, women of nearly every age and ethnic group stood behind
President Barack Obama at a National Equal Pay Day event this week.

You’d never know, though, that women stood to gain from the
bill LBJ signed with more than 75 pens in a grand East Room ceremony on July 2,
1964.

The first lady, Lady
Bird Johnson, wearing a red dress, sat on the front row, a sea of white men in
sober suits around and behind her. Among the hundred guests were powerful
members of Congress, a few prominent male civil rights leaders, including the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins, and almost no women. Men also made up the fringe of reporters and
photographers on the sidelines.

A hundred years after the Civil War, the president opened a
new era of equal rights for all, but his remarks also reflected the reality that
women were not really part of the picture.

“We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of
liberty,” LBJ said. “Yet millions are being deprived of these blessings – not
because of their own failings – but because of the color of their skin.”

Johnson urged “every public official, every religious
leader, every business and professional man, every working man, every housewife”
to help make the law a success. He made no mention of women in the
workplace.

You might think women were an afterthought in the law – and
you’d be right.

Including the word “sex” in the law’s protections was an idea
that backfired. House Rules chairman Howard W. Smith, D-Va., an outspoken
opponent of civil rights, proposed adding gender as a ploy to kill the bill.

“He had counted on his colleagues to share his view that sex
discrimination was not to be taken seriously and that its inclusion would
sufficiently trivialize the bill, ensuring its defeat,” according to
Encyclopedia Virginia, a publication of the Virginia Foundation for the
Humanities and the Library of Virginia, which adds, “Johnson, meanwhile opposed
the sex amendment lest it disturb what was already a fragile coalition
supporting civil rights.

“Smith introduced the amendment as ‘a joke,’ according to a
House colleague, and he snickered about the difficulties women faced in
achieving what he called their ‘right to a nice husband and family.’ The
chamber erupted with laughter,” the entry at encyclopediaivirginia.org says.

Other accounts say Smith insisted he actually had been
working with Alice Paul of the National Women’s Party. In any case, Rep. Martha
Griffiths, D-Mich., worked to keep the protection for women in the bill. When the
measure passed, women in the House gallery cheered, and Johnson signed it into
law that evening.

Johnson’s ability to build a bipartisan coalition on Capitol
Hill and his courage in pressing for equal rights, knowing that the law would
be ruinous for the Democratic Party in the South, are impressive. Obama,
speaking at the LBJ Presidential Library this week, took an expansive view:

“Because of the Civil Rights movement, because of the laws
President Johnson signed, new doors of opportunity and education swung open for
everybody…Not just blacks and whites, but also women and Latinos; and Asians
and Native Americans; and gay Americans and Americans with a disability.”

Pictures told the story of how much of a difference the
Civil Rights Act has made in all our lives – and especially that single word that Griffiths
fought to keep.